2024-01-21 06:50:42
When we journalists were celebrating our day, last June, I dedicated this column to the issue that is once once more regrettably relevant in these times, a month and days since the inauguration of the new government. At that time, the cases of professional malpractice due to the exaggerated militant option between the Kirchner administration and the Macrista opposition had grown in an astonishing way: dozens of professionals in this profession had chosen to abandon the good arts of journalism to dedicate themselves –without anesthesia– on one side or another of politics.
Today I subscribe to those words: militant journalism invades the media at the hands of panelists, opinion leaders and references with fame in the media, particularly screens, without further arguments. In that text I quoted a phrase published by Mariano Moreno on June 7, 1810 in La Gazeta de Buenos Ayres: “Truth, like virtue, has in itself its most incontestable apology; by dint of discussing and airing them they appear in all their splendor and brilliance; If restrictions are opposed to speech, the spirit will vegetate like the matter; “Error, lies, worry, fanaticism and brutalization will become the motto of the people, and will forever cause their dejection, their ruin and their misery.”
I return today to the words of a great Argentine master of journalism, Tomás Eloy Martínez: “The reader’s thirst for knowledge is not satisfied with scandal but with honest investigation; He does not appease it with blows of effect but with the narration of each event within its context and its antecedents. The reader is not distracted by fireworks or loud denunciations that disappear the next day, but is respected with accurate information. Every time a journalist throws fuel on the will-o’-the-wisp of scandal, he is putting out the genuine fire of information with ashes. Journalism is not a circus to show off, but an instrument to think, to create, to help man in his eternal fight for a more dignified and less unjust life.”
Another great master of this craft, the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski, was asked by a colleague: “To be a journalist do you have to be a good person?” Kapuscinski responded: “Yes, I am very sure of this. Our work depends a lot on other people. It is a collective work. We only record people’s voices and opinions. If our sources don’t want to talk to us, we won’t get information.”
Juan Cruz Ruiz, a prestigious Spanish journalist, attached to the management of the Prensa Ibérica group (the newspaper El País is part of the company), pointed out in 2015 that the practice of opting for one political line or another is fine in the case of media, but clarified: “The worst is trench journalism (our militant journalism), in which information is used as a political weapon in favor of a certain party. “This has damaged journalism, something that I feel is deplorable.”
The proposal that this ombudsman wants to express to the readers of PERFIL is to be extremely attentive when listening to, reading and watching their journalistic references, and to do so with a critical spirit, without “buying” opinions clearly expressed in one direction or another.
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